This week I’m talking to journalist and totally-not-a-bot Taylor Crumpton. We talk about how Taylor went from grad student to freelance journalist, how Twitter is a platform for both highlighting marginalized voices and exploiting Black women’s labour, and why it might not be a good idea to burn the flag (hint: the reason might surprise you). In fact, we touch on so many topics that I’m anticipating an extra-long list of links. And here it is!

Taylor talks about getting her start as a writer through The OpEd Project, which is dedicated to “increas[ing] the range of voices and quality of ideas we hear in the world.”

Taylor also talks about being told in grade school that she couldn’t write, which reminded me of lawyer, writer, and podcaster Hadiya Rodrigue’s incredible essay “Black on Bay Street,” which recounts similar experiences of being gaslit and discouraged as a student.

I tried to find you a good piece about Beyonce’s pregnancy photoshoot and the symbolism of the images and the misplaced critique of her fetishizing pregnancy, but everything I found was so absolutely terrible that I’m going to link to Taylor’s piece on Medium instead!

You probably already know Zoé Samudzi‘s work but just in case, here’s her latest piece on why facial recognition technology doesn’t work on Black people and how that might actually be a good thing.

I actually didn’t know about Wear Your Voice magazine, which (it turns out) is an incredible platform for intersectional feminist work and I immediately read like five articles so you should go check it out.

Just in case you aren’t familiar with Black Twitter, here’s a good intro to its importance and influence.

This article is probably my favourite piece on paying women (i.e. #GiveWomenYourMoney). I couldn’t find the original invoice for emotional labour that I mentioned to Taylor, but while I was looking for it I found this website that will help you calculate how much the patriarchy owes you, and it is very satisfying. It accounts for menstrual products and wage gap!

Last link! (Told you this list would be long.) This article explains how racism impacts people’s ability to call cabs, and how services like Uber and Lyft improve access to vehicles for people of colour.

Content warning for a brief discussion of disordered and restrictive eating.

In this week’s minisode I’m tackling a topic that I’ve been putting off for approximately two and a half seasons of this podcast: veganism. I talk about why I chose to be a vegan fourteen-and-a-half years ago, why it still brings me joy, and why I also think it’s an incredibly fraught identity. Along the way I touch on the different histories of the vegan and so-called “clean eating” movements, the problem with white animal rights activists, and the links between veganism and restrictive eating. But I also talk about joy! And donuts! Plus Kaarina is here to talk to us about setting attainable goals as a way to be kinder to ourselves. Here are some links!

One of the foundational books of my own veganism was Carol J. Adams’ The Sexual Politics of Meat. I haven’t read it in over a decade, though, so this is just a fact and not a recommendation. A book I do recommend most wholeheartedly is Timothy Findlay’s Not Wanted On the Voyage. Just to warn you, I’ve read it five times and cried every time. Oh, one more book recommendation, if you like the intersections of philosophy and conversations about the human and the animal and stuff: J.M. Coetzee’s The Lives of Animals. Beautiful, complex, challenging stuff. Wildly meta.

This article by Victorianist Susan Hamilton is a great introduction to Victorian anti-vivisection protests and the way they demonstrated the links between the policing of the animal/human divide and the policing of the gender binary. My favourite book on the links between white women, sentimentality, and imperialism is Christina Klein’s Cold War Orientalism.

The podcast theme song is “Mesh Shirt” by Mom Jeans off their album “Chub Rub.” Listen to the whole album here or learn more about them here. Follow me @hkpmcgregor, follow Kaarina @kaarinasaurus, and tweet about the podcast using #SecretFeministAgenda.

Secret Feminist Agenda is recorded and produced by Hannah McGregor on the traditional and unceded territories of the Squamish, Musqueam, and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations.

Two and a half years ago, at a Witch, Please meet-up in Cambridge, Massachusetts, I met a rad artist and Harry Potter nerd who offered to tour Marcelle and me around the Wizarding World of Harry Potter if we ever made it down to Florida. A year ago we took her up on it. And this year Julie Frances and I continued our history of border-crossing collaborations by recording a discussion of tattoos, unpaid internships, transforming industries, and making art. Oh, and crystals and energies and the moon and stuff. Here are some links!

It’s minisode time, and this week I’m picking up some of the threads from last week’s episode plus the peer review for season two plus conversations from my own classroom and pulling them together in either a beautiful tapestry or a tangled knot. Either way, I’m talking about teaching and the politics of the classroom. I touch on why I love talking about teaching, how this podcast might blur the boundaries between teaching and research, and some of the most important lessons I’ve learned from teaching thus far. If you’re a teacher or a student I hope there will be something interesting for you in here. Have some links!

I read from Dr. Anna Poletti’s peer review of season two; if you’d like to read the rest of that review, you can do that here.

Here’s a short piece I wrote a couple of years ago about the gendered labour of defending teaching — and students.

And a coupleof good pieces about how taking on a disproportionate amount of service harms women academics’ careers.

Finally: Kaarina recommends reading YA, and in turn I’m going to recommend listening to the new podcast by friend and former guest Brenna Clarke Gray, Hazel & Katniss & Harry & Starr, in which she and cohost Joe take a deep dive into YA novels and their adaptations. It’s awesome! You should listen to it!

The podcast theme song is “Mesh Shirt” by Mom Jeans off their album “Chub Rub.” Listen to the whole album here or learn more about them here. Follow me @hkpmcgregor, follow Kaarina @kaarinasaurus, and tweet about the podcast using #SecretFeministAgenda.

Secret Feminist Agenda is recorded and produced by Hannah McGregor on the traditional and unceded territories of the Squamish, Musqueam, and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations.

In this long overdue (and also slightly late) episode, I talk to brilliant musician, writer, artist, and teacher Vivek Shraya about touring difficult books, finding more equitable ways to run your classroom, and the enduring power of the shit sandwich. And here are some links!

Vivek mentions a keynote by Neil Gaiman, in which he describes making art as “sometimes like putting messages in bottles, on a desert island, and hoping that someone will find one of your bottles and open it and read it, and put something in a bottle that will wash its way back to you: appreciation, or a commission, or money, or love.” Read that whole talk here.

And here’s a link to the excellent thread friend-of-the-show Cynara Geissler wrote about the do’s and don’ts of giving a public reading.

Finally, on the topic of student-shaming (and why it’s bullshit), here’s Aimée Morrison on those who are praised for saying “things that confirm people’s authoritarian biases and distaste for youth” and an iconic piece by Jesse Stommel on how widespread bullying is in universities.

Happy 2019, you gorgeous humans. I hope everyone got a chance to take some time off and refresh before the calendar reset. I don’t really believe in resolutions, but I do like the way significant dates give us a chance to pause and refocus on what counts. And we’re starting off strong in 2019 with an episode about what is and isn’t white supremacy, the recent resurgence of race science, and the responsibility white folks have to keep educating ourselves and working actively against white supremacy as a system. Here are some links!

First up, if you’d like to read the peer review for Season 2 you can find it right here.

The podcast theme song is “Mesh Shirt” by Mom Jeans off their album “Chub Rub.” Listen to the whole album here or learn more about them here. Follow me @hkpmcgregor, follow Kaarina @kaarinasaurus, and tweet about the podcast using #SecretFeministAgenda.

Secret Feminist Agenda is recorded and produced by Hannah McGregor on the traditional and unceded territories of the Squamish, Musqueam, and Tsleil-Waututh First Nations.

In this, the final episode of 2018, I got to talk to weightlifting pal and femme genius Tara Robertson about her work on diversity and inclusion at Mozilla — and like a million other things, including why we want an open Internet, whether libraries are neutral (hint: they’re not), the conservative politics of tone policing, the danger of corporations replacing the public sphere, and more! That’s a lot of topics, so here are a bunch of links!